Leaked Contract Helps Sallie Mae and USA Funds in Court

From WikiLeaks

A contract between Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student-loan company, and USA Funds, the nation’s largest guarantee agency, helps both companies share hundreds of millions of dollars in federal student-loan business. It has now also helped the two companies thwart a lawsuit alleging fraud.

A federal judge in Chicago, Milton I. Shadur, this week dismissed the lawsuit, which had been brought by Rhonda Salmeron, a former manager at Enterprise Recovery Systems, a Chicago-area loan-collections company that worked under contract for USA Funds.

The judge dismissed the case as punishment for actions by Ms. Salmeron’s lawyer, including his leaking of the contract between Sallie Mae and USA Funds. The contract was described in a June report by The Chronicle and posted online by Wikileaks, a Web site that specializes in publishing documents provided by anonymous whistle-blowers.

Guarantee agencies are nonprofit entities whose duties include contacting borrowers who fall behind in repaying federally guaranteed loans. They also relay the federal reimbursement for defaulted borrowers to loan companies after the guarantor ensures that the lender has complied with the terms of the program.

Because of the guarantor’s oversight role, federal law requires a lender and a guarantor to be separate entities. A former director of student-aid policy at the Education Department, Larry Oxendine, said the publication of the contract between Sallie Mae and USA Funds demonstrated that their relationship was so intertwined and detrimental to the interests of students and taxpayers that the department should revisit its controversial 2004 decision to allow the partnership to continue.

Ms. Salmeron’s lawsuit concerned collections work that Enterprise Recovery Systems performed on behalf of USA Funds. The lawsuit alleged that USA Funds, in advance of site visits, routinely notified Enterprise Recovery Systems of which borrower case files it would examine, allowing the subcontractor to alter its records to show that the borrowers had been contacted about the status of their loans.

Enterprise Recovery Systems had not been contacting the borrowers at intervals required by law, Ms. Salmeron asserted in the lawsuit, thereby harming both borrowers and taxpayers by allowing the amount of the borrowers’ federally guaranteed debts to grow unchecked.

The lawsuit said that Sallie Mae, through its purchase of USA Group, the former parent of USA Funds, had a financial interest in the collections work.

A spokesman for USA Funds, Robert P. Murray, rejected the claims against his company, saying that the annual audits that USA Funds conducts of collection agencies are not required by federal regulation, and that USA Funds therefore has the right to define the terms of how it conducts the audits. All three companies denied Ms. Salmeron’s allegations in court filings. —Paul Basken

First appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Thanks to the Chronicle and Paul Basken for covering this material. Copyright remains with the author. Consult http://chronicle.com/ for reprint rights.